Saturday, September 14, 2019

SELECT UnitPrice, ProductName
FROM Products
ORDER BY UnitPrice DESC, ProductName

The query above sorts the results based on the most expensive products, and then the product name. Useful if you want a secondary sort criteria. For example if there are multiple products that are $14.00 then those products will be sorted by their names after the price has been sorted.

Monday, September 9, 2019

Before we begin inserting data into mongoDB we need to understand the difference between Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) and mongoDB. RDBMS is a database many of us worked with in the past. You have tables and relationships between those tables. We will use the ACME Bank that we were build our AngularJS SPA application as an example.

Sunday, September 8, 2019

The "Server Explorer" tool in Visual Studio 2013 is a good tool at your disposal if want to interact with the database in GUI environment. To create a new data connection to the database in the "Server Explorer" perform the following actions:

Click on "Server Explorer" tab in the left hand side, then click on "Add Connection"

Saturday, September 7, 2019

There are times when you are handed over an .mdf file and are tasked to create a new database out of it. There's no log just an .mdf file. The easiest way to create a new database is to use the query editor in SQL Management Studio type the following into the Sql Query window

The query above will create a new database for you call "Northwind", all you have to do is specify the location of the .mdf file and the "FOR ATTACH_REBUILD_LOG" will rebuild the log for you. You might run into a "Access denied" error but it's a permissions issue. Make sure the user that is running the query has permission to the file.

Wednesday, September 4, 2019

In a typical git scenario you would have a new branch for developers to work on, the when he or she is done. You do your code reviews and what not. After you are satisfied with the results you would want to merge the new branch into the master branch.

In this post I am going to show you how to merge an existing branch into a master branch

Here are the steps:

1. First you want to checkout the master branch to work on it with the command git checkout master

Tuesday, September 3, 2019

In previous posts we created a new git repository locally and on github and then sync them up. In this post we are going to create a new branch in the local git repository and push it to the remote repository.

First let's create a new branch with the following command in the local git repository

Sunday, September 1, 2019

The NOT IN operator in SQL means that you are retrieving records in the database that does not match the values in a comma separated list. In other words it retrieves the inverse of the IN statement by itself. Here is an example of how you can use the IN operator in the products table in the Northwind database.

SELECT *
FROM Products
WHERE SupplierID NOT IN (1,2)

The above example all the products will be retrieved except for products with SupplierID of 1 or 2, here are the results

Saturday, August 31, 2019

When you need to do an insert into multiple database table you need to the get the ID of the insert so that you could use that ID for the next insert. Here is how you would do that with the Scope_Identity()which gets the last inserted ID back to you if you execute your query with the ExecuteScalar() method.

Thursday, August 29, 2019

In the previous post we installed Git on Windows. On this post we are going to set up Git with our user name and assign Bracks as our Git editor so that we don't have to edit git through the command line console all the time.

Wednesday, August 28, 2019

A lot of examples on logging in ASP.NET Core shows you how to add console logging to your ASP.NET Core application. But it's pretty useless in a real world application. What you really want is to write to a file or a database. There's a package called Microsoft.Extensions.Logging.Log4Net.AspNetCore that will make your application use log4Net.

Monday, August 26, 2019

Now that we have our data in the database it is time for us to show the data to our users and we going to use the repository pattern to show our data. A repository pattern is basically a conduit between the database and our business objects that has built in CRUD operations. It is ideal for LOB applications. There are many websites and books that explains the repository pattern better than I do. Feel free to explore them.

Here are the steps to create a product repository for the products in the database:

1. Create a folder in the NorthwindCafe.Web solution call "Data"
2. Create an interface call IProductRepository in the "Data" folder, this will be the interface that we implement our repository from.

Thursday, August 22, 2019

In this post will are going to finally create the database that we have been preparing for in the last previous blog posts. It's a two step process, first you have to add the NorthwindContext to the application in the Startup class, then you have to run the Entity Framework migration tool.

Here are the steps to create your NorthwindCafe database:

1. Open the Startup.cs file, then type the following lines in the ConfigureServices method

The line above gets the connection string from the appSettings.json file that we've created earlier. Then use the AddDbContext method in the services instance. Dependency injection will take care of the plumbing for you. Using lamba expression we tell the Entity Framework to use the Sql Sever provider for Entity Framework core.

Make sure you have the following namespaces in your Startup class

using NorthwindCafe.Web.Models;
using Microsoft.Extensions.Configuration;
using Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection;
using Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore;

Wednesday, August 21, 2019

In our previous post we created the models for our Northwind Cafe application. In this blog we will create the DbContext class which is the conduit between your entity classes and the database. Think of it as a bridge that the database and the entity framework has to cross to get to each other.

Tuesday, August 20, 2019

In the previous post we added a configuration file call appSettings.json file to store our connection string to the database that we are going to create through Entity Framework. Even though Microsoft provides us with the Northwind database, we don't really want to use it because it's outdated. We are going to modernize the database by rebuilding it from scratch with the code first approach with Entity Framework Core. If you look at the existing Northwind database you will see that there's a lot of redundant data and tables. For example there are tables for Customers, Employees, Suppliers and Shippers. Those are basically roles, and we will take care of those roles later on in the series using the Identity framework. What we are going to do is start out simple with just the Products, Categories, Orders, OrderDetails table and add on to those tables as we progress in building the application.

Monday, August 19, 2019

With text-transform you can transform your text into Autobots or Deceptacon? Not exactly, but what you can do is transform your text to uppercase, lowercase, capitalize it. It's pretty self explanatory.

Sunday, August 18, 2019

The DATEPART function extracts the date part of a date, for example using the 'yyyy' expression allows you to extract the year from a given date. The query below queries all the employees who were hired in the year 1994 in the Northwind Employees table.

Friday, August 16, 2019

Have you always wished to have more control with your text position, but feel like you limited with the text alignment of

Align Left text-align: left;

Align Center text-align: center;

Align Right text-align: right;

Justify text-align: justify;
Well you could always do that with CSS with the text-indent property, the only caveat is that it has to be a block based element. Meaning it automatically puts a line break after the tag. If you need a refresher on block vs line element, I have an excellent post on this topic here. I know a shameless plug, oh and please click on my ads so that I can retire on a tropical island!...lol

Anyways back to the tutorial. So with the text indent you have total control over the indentation you need on your block element. It could either be a length value or a percentage value.

Well first let's define a div that we want our text to be in, then the text-indent will be based on that div.

Let's say we have the following styles:

div { width: 800px}

p.tdp {text-indent: 15%}

And the following markup

<div>
<p class="tdp">Indent this text please Indent this text please Indent this text please Indent this text please</p>
<p>This is just normal text This is just normal text This is just normal text This is just normal text This is just normal text</p>
</div>

Thursday, August 15, 2019

There are often times when you see the measurement in CSS that looks something like this font-size: 2em; what does that actually mean? Well an em simply means its the multiplier of the font-size of the element. For instance 2em means that it will multiply the font-size of the element by 2x.

Let's say we have a div with a font-size of 15px, and there's a span tag with a font-size of 2em. The span font-size of the span would be 30px, because the span is part of the div element.

Wednesday, August 14, 2019

I believe the last iPhone I owned was an iPhone 3? I don't remember, but it was a while back. It was actually a very good phone. I love Apple products, but the price just seems to increase on each iterations and the features were less and less with each upgrades. I found myself with a life or death situation. Should I go to the dark side (Darth Vader breathing) an "Andriod Phone". Oh my god, stop it I said to myself...lol But at the time the Android phones were getting good. So I decided to take the plunge and never looked back.

Anyways back to the present day, I have Apple envy because it has this great ecosystem, that I can't tapped into because I don't have an iPhone. That is until I got the new iPad, which is the cheaper version of the iPad, but it's not really cheap at all it's the best iPad out there for the price. I got it so that I can watch movies and read magazines while I was commuting. What I found surprising was that once again I am tapped into the Apple ecosystem with my iPad. I can sign up to all the new services that Apple is touting. I am currently subscribed to News+ because I am a news junkie. But if you think about it most of the new Apple services are ideal for consumption on a bigger screen.

Since I have unlimited plan on my Android phone, I used it as a hotspot for my iPad. Put my iPad in a stylish mini bag, and I am good to go. My iPad became a substitute for an iPhone, for less than 1K that's not bad. I know what you are thinking an Android phone and an iPad working together? That's like the rebellion working with the empire. But that's the closest thing to world piece right now and we should take it :)

If you want to contribute to my retirement fund you can buy it here on Amazon, it's actually a really good tablet for the price. I mean the screen is amazing. I got the older model and I am still using everyday. iOS is awesome, that's the one thing I like about the empire's product (I mean Apple's product).

There are certain keywords in CSS that works on a global scale and inherit is one of them.
The keyword inherit simply means that current element inherit the properties of it's parent element.
It is applied automatically be default, but it could be useful when you want to be specific about what you want.

For example if you define the following style for the parent element

#parentElem {color: red; font-weight: bold}

And have the following markup, the style will automatically be applied to the child element

Monday, August 12, 2019

By using @font-face declaration you can use custom fonts in your web pages. The way this works is that you can host the fonts on your server, and then the user agent will download the font for future renders, for example you can specify the following markup to use a custom font that's not widely available.

@font-face{
font-family: "Verana";
src: url("Verana-Regular.otf");
}

You can get the free fonts here at Arkandis Digital Foundry to play around with custom fonts.
The url can be a local resource within the local server, or a remote resource on the internet.

Friday, August 9, 2019

A big part of web development is dealing with the DOM (Document Object Model) the DOM is organized in a hierarchical order. You locate an element in the DOM by traversing through the DOM tree. For instance if you have an ordered list there's a natural hierarchical order to it.

Wednesday, August 7, 2019

The most commonly used selectors in CSS are the class and ID selectors. A class in CSS is defined with a . in front of it. For example you can have class call .rainbow and an ID for a div call rainbow those are two different things.

To apply a style to a class you define the class in the stylesheet as

.rainbow { color: pink; font-weight: bold; font-size:24px;}

Then you would use the class as such in the HTML markup

<p class="rainbow">What color am I?</p>

But if you want to apply style to an id that's used in HTML markup you have to do the opposite.
To reference an id in HTML you have to prefix your CSS style with the # character so in the CSS style you would have the following declaration

Monday, August 5, 2019

Now that we have most of our static contents taken care of for our application, meaning we did everything we could without a database. It's time to create our database. But before we can do that we need a place to store our connection string to the database. Usually we just store the connection string in the web.config file in our web application. However, since ASP.NET Core is trying to break free from the old way of doing things, there's a new way to store configuration information which is more flexible the old web.config way. As usual it also requires more work.

Thursday, August 1, 2019

In this tutorial we will add icons to your navbar. In the previous tutorial we added a responsive layout with bootstrap. In this post we will add some icons to your navigation. Font-Awesome gives you professional looking vector graphics, which are implemented using CSS.

Wednesday, July 31, 2019

In our previous blog we created a simple _Layout.cshtml file that does not have any markup just to make things simple. In this blog we will use Bootstrap to make the layout look more professional and responsive, so that it can be viewed in any screen size. The previous layout looks like screenshot below.

Tuesday, July 30, 2019

In this blog post we are going to add the jQuery, and bootstrap libraries to our ASP.NET Core application. Normally we will use NuGet to bring in these libraries but ASP.NET Core gives you the option to use bower.json file to configure the dependencies that you will need on the client-side using NPM in the backend.

Here are the steps to import the client-side dependencies into our project:1. First let's add bower.json file of the "NorthwindCafe.Web" project, Right-click on the NorthwindCafe.Web project and add a file called bower.json in the project

Monday, July 29, 2019

In ASP.NET MVC there is a default layout file that the application use when one exists. If you look at the markup at the top of the "Index.cshtml" file you will see that there is a markup to specify the layout of the page in the code below.

@{
Layout = null;
}

The code above tells ASP.NET MVC to not assign any layout to the page because it is being set to null. In this blog we will build on our existing NorthwindCafe.Web project and add a default layout view to the project so that each page in the project will have a common layout. This is similar what you would a master page for in web forms.

Friday, July 26, 2019

In the previous post we have enabled MVC on our application. Now we want to add our first MVC controller and view to test out verify that MVC is working. We also have to tell ASP.NET Core what pattern to look for when looking for our controllers and views.

Thursday, July 25, 2019

In this post we will go over the process of enabling ASP.NET MVC in our application. Just like static files, in order for us to use MVC in our application we have to tell ASP.NET Core to use Mvc in the Startup.cs file. We will continue to use the application "NorthwindCafe" that we used in our previous blog.

Here are the steps to add MVC to your application:

1. Open the Startup.cs file, then in "Configure" method type in the following to enable MVC

// This method gets called by the runtime. Use this method to configure the HTTP request pipeline.
public void Configure(IApplicationBuilder app, IHostingEnvironment env)
{
if (env.IsDevelopment())
{
app.UseDeveloperExceptionPage();
}
app.UseStaticFiles();
app.UseMvc();
}

Wednesday, July 24, 2019

As I have mentioned before ASP.NET Core decouples the application from the infrastructure as much as possible. Therefore, you have to tell it exactly what you want in your project. In this blog post we are going to tell ASP.NET that we want to serve static html files in our application.

Here are the steps to serve static files in our ASP.NET Core application.

1. Open the "NorthwindCafe.Web" project, then click on the "Startup.cs" file in the project. You will see the following markup in the Configure method

Monday, July 22, 2019

Technology has moved at a breakneck speed, after working with ASP.NET Core for a while, I realized that my ASP.NET MVC blog articles have become outdated. Don't get me wrong, MVC is still a very big part of ASP.NET Core, but that's the thing it's just a part of it. ASP.NET Core has decoupled the infrastructure from the application. You can deploy your web app on Docker imagine that! No longer is IIS your primary means of hosting your ASP.NET application.

However, with this new freedom comes added complexity. No longer can you just drag and drop components into your design surface. Those days are long gone. This post ist meant to ease your way into ASP.NET Core. I will using the release candidate version two of ASP.NET Core for this post and other subsequent posts. I found out that I can't really follow my blog posts anymore to create the project with the latest version which is 2.1. Don't use 2.2 for now because there's still not a lot of documentation on it. So here is the updated version I will be using Visual Studio 2017 for my development. You can use the command line interface and notepad to develop your ASP.NET Core application. But, I think that borders on insanity.

Monday, January 21, 2019

Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) is a set of kernel medications developed by the NSA and later distributed to the public to secure computer systems. Most people would disable it on install because it's a pain to work with. But, if configured correctly it could harden your system considerably.

First let's install all the packages that we need for SELinux with the following yum command

Monday, January 14, 2019

Sometimes you don't want to do everything with the root account. So there are some super users who you trust as administrators. For those users you want them to be able to run the sudo command. A sudo command allows a user to run commands with root privileges without logging in as root.
For example something like this sudo yum update unlike the su command which prompts you for the root password. The sudo command prompts you for the password of the logged in user.

In order for the sudo to work we have to configure the /etc/sudoers file. There is a special command for editing the sudoers file and it's the visudo command. This command should be used at all times when editing the sudoers file instead of a text editor.

Thursday, January 10, 2019

One of the first thing you would do in web development is to link an external Cascading Stylesheet to an HTML document. As a matter of fact bootstrap would not work if you didn't link the bootstrap.css file in your HTML document. Linking an external document is easy enough you often see the link like this

Wednesday, January 9, 2019

Up until this point all we did was take care of the plumbing, MongoDB for the database, AngularJS as the application framework, expressJS for hosting, and Heroku as deployment infrastructure in the cloud. Whew! It feels like I am spitting out development hastags and buzzwords. But, you know what they always say "it takes a village to build a SPA application". Well they didn't say that, but they should! Who are they anyways? The software engineer gods? Or god forbid the mythical "full stack developers!! Fear them the full stack developers! But I don't know who they are, you ask. Well they are just awesome! God says. They are 10x! Wow 10x, you said to yourself. They must be good! Hahaha I just love the buzzwords. It's entertaining. I would never say I am a full stack developer. I am just a developer who knows a lot of stuff.

In this post we are going to take a step back and start working on the actual application and take the plumbing out of the equation for a while.

As with any application at the center of it all is the question. What does the application do?
Since our application is banking application, we will create objects that are in the banking domain. This is called a domain driven design. We are not going to follow the domain driven design (DDD) to a T, but we will follow the spirit of it.

Tuesday, January 8, 2019

In this post we are going to install Ninject which is a lightweight IOC container. You can think of an IOC container as a magic toolbox that gives you the tools that you need when you need it. Hence its called dependency injection, meaning it injects the dependencies that you need. As with any IOC container there needs to be a mapping between the interfaces and the implementation. That's where Ninject comes in.

First let's install Ninject with Nuget. here are the steps:

1. Open the Nuget Management Console and type in the following command

Monday, January 7, 2019

In the previous post we created a user called "John Wallace", in this post we are going to add John and Jason into the developers group. In any system you want to group users into groups so that you can easily assign constraints and privileges to a group of user instead of doing it one at a time.